A Brief History of JavaScript
summary
Covers concrete history and standards work at TC39, claims about language design tradeoffs and committee process, and features actually implemented: ES6/ES2015 cadence and proxies, the asm.js optimization path that led to WebAssembly, and numeric fixes like BigInt added to fix 53‑bit precision limits. Reports a real-world port — Unreal Engine 3 compiled and running at 60 fps in four days — and describes engine toolchain: typed arrays, bitwise tricks, baseline and optimizing JITs, plus staged proposals like dynamic import and async iteration.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:57Competition
- 2:22ECMO
- 3:49The Committee
- 5:28The Ugly
- 6:18The Old Days
- 8:01Regular Expressions
- 9:34JavaScript and C
- 11:17WebAssembly
- 13:33Big
- 14:54Machine Types
- 15:21Fibonacci
- 15:55Stage 3 Proposals
- 17:27Conclusion
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